1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to communication systems and methods with monitoring and control functions. In particular, it relates to communication systems with parental control and supervision of a child's wireless device usage.
2. State of the Art
There are several concerns preventing parents from purchasing cellular telephones for their children. One concern is that the child will abuse her calling privileges by calling accidentally or inappropriately resulting in high bills. Another important concern is that an stranger adult may attempt to contact the child though her cellular telephone without the knowledge and consent of the parent. The natural fear is the stranger may be kidnapper or abuser. A further concern is that the child will lose or misplace the handheld telephone device. An unauthorized user could potentially benefit from gratuitous telephone calls that the parent will have to ultimately pay.
Modern cellular telephones offer games and other entertainment applications. Parents may be hesitant to provide portable game platforms to children as the games might prove distracting during other activities.
Some cellular telephones are equipped with ground positioning system (GPS) microcontrollers providing information about the location of the cellular phone. GPS services might be used to help safeguard children, but currently the handsets are too expensive for mass-market consumption.
There are applications whereby a parent may specify a cap on the amount an account can spend per month. There are also systems that allow parents to program telephone numbers and universal remote locator (URL) links as forbidden or restricted call destinations.
While these systems provide a useful manner for controlling cellular phones, they generally present limitations that have not been addressed until now. The first and most impacting limitation is the inability of the current systems to allow the parent to control the incoming phone calls. Parent may wish to limit incoming phone calls of adult strangers to protect their children from being victims of criminal activity, to limit the distractions she gets from friends such as invitations to play games on the internet, to alleviate a child from telemarketers interruptions, or to simply reduce the total usage time of the child.
A second limitation of current systems is that they do not allow for a time-based control of telephone applications and calls. While previous systems provided parents with the ability of restricting a number to call, for instance, they did not provide parents with the ability to restrict those numbers for particular periods of time. A third limitation of current systems is that they do not allow parents to access the call history of the child's telephone from the parents hand held device. A fourth limitation is that parents do not have the means to reroute phone calls to their telephones based on certain criteria of the incoming call number or based on the time the call is made. Finally, yet another limitation is that current systems do not allow for parent to schedule events on their children's phones such as setting reminding messages for the child.